It's called the "first flush," and it isn't pretty. After months of idyllic weather, Los Angeles gets hammered by winter storms. The rain picks up oil from the streets, washes particulate matter from the rooftops, and carries everything from cigarette butts to pathogens straight into Santa Monica Bay. Afterward, the water is so polluted that yellow signs must be posted from Malibu to Long Beach, warning would-be swimmers to stay ashore. Many surfers who just can't resist the waves are familiar with the resulting illnesses: gastroenteritis, fevers, and even skin lesions. Today, toxic runoff is the country's number one water pollution problem.
"It's ironic that a state defined by its oceans has some of the most serious water pollution problems in the country," says NRDC attorney David Beckman. Reducing the amount of toxic soup that ends up in the Pacific (nearly a trillion gallons per year in Southern California alone) is Beckman's job. Since coming to NRDC in 1995, he's practically memorized the federal Clean Water Act -- and spent countless hours trying to bridge the great gulf that exists between the laws, which demand that cities clean up their runoff, and enforcement, which is abysmal. The Los Angeles Regional Quality Control Board, for example, which is supposed to manage Southern California's entrenched urban runoff problems, employs just a fraction of the people needed to oversee some 2,900 industries, 85 municipalities, and 700 construction sites. And since the sources of the pollution are so amorphous, the solutions are neither quick nor easy.
"You need multiple tools in your toolbox," Beckman says. Those include lawsuits, laborious negotiations, legislation, and even lectures on storm-water filteration systems. Carrying on the work begun by NRDC attorneys before him, Beckman, thirty-six, will use whatever it takes, preferring to pursue what he calls a "holistic approach." That means not only taking individual polluters to court (NRDC has sued recalcitrant cities and industries up and down the coast), but also spending a lot of time working to get tough standards on the books.
Take the way Beckman is fighting the effects of what he calls "dumb development." Between 1970 and 1990, the Los Angeles area added 3.1 million people to its population and urbanized another 394 square miles. "It's the old pavement-equals-pollution problem," Beckman says. Recognizing the trend was not going to stop anytime soon, he came up with a few low-cost solutions that developers could use to better handle runoff. Adding grassy swales to their designs, for example, so that water seeps into the ground. Or filters that can be placed on curbside storm drains.
In January 2000, the regional water board voted to make large construction projects implement these kinds of controls -- quite a coup for environmentalists, who were used to seeing Los Angeles developers get their way. CALTRANS, the state transportation agency in charge of building and maintaining roads, is working out similar solutions in response to an NRDC lawsuit -- installing storm drains on highways and designing roads with grass buffers and retention basins to capture runoff so it filters out over time.
Beckman is also perfectly willing to go to court. In 1998, he sued the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) after it failed to establish overall pollution limits for some 130 bodies of water in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, a huge urban area. The standards should have been set in 1979. Last year, EPA finally agreed to comply.
Beckman points out this is only the beginning. Although 2002 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Clean Water Act, many problems remain unresolved: protecting aquifers, for example. For his part, Beckman remains undaunted. "Sure, these fights take years," he says. "But there's no better motivator than seeing improvement in something as vital to life as water."
-- Jill Davis
